Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age concept is used to depict the way humans interact with their environment. The first Axial Age (800-200 BC) can be typified among others as the age in which humans started to objectify nature. Nature was dispossessed of spirits, gods and vital forces that humans previously feared and used as explanation for the origin of things. Secularised and objectified nature became a...
It is not surprising that in a time of intensified ecological awareness a new appreciation of nature and the inanimate world arises. Two examples are panpsychism (the extension of consciousness to the cosmos) and deep incarnation (the idea that God was not only incarnated in human form but also in the non-human world). Consciousness studies flourish and are related to nature, the animal world...
The importance of animals in the evolutionary history of homo sapiens comes to the fore in light of an increasingly trans-human techno-scientific environment. New research on consciousness, and animal consciousness in particular, has prompted questions relating to animal rights, animal morality and the emergence of a creaturely theology and theological primatology. The possibility of...
This article treats self-transcendence – like all transcendence – as a fact of human life. Inter alia this means that the human mind perforce operates in terms of binary concepts such as finitude–infinity, inner world–outside world, self–other, desire–fulfilment, separation–union and the like. We find these concepts in most myths of origin. The concept of desire (Eros), combining unfulfilment...
The article offers examples of a post-Reformation theology which could be described as postmodern, post-metaphysical, anti-fundamentalist, immanent transcendent, corporeal, narrative, holistic and secularly spiritual. As examples of the kind of Reformed belief that is increasingly questioned it examines the doctrine of revelation, the doctrine of God and of salvation, with proposals of how they...